Quetta Bombing Underscores Pakistan Chaos

Local residents at the site of overnight twin suicide bombings in Quetta, Jan. 11.

The killing of 81 people in a Shiite area of Quetta on Thursday is the latest sign that a war by Sunni militants on minority sects in Pakistan is spiraling out of control.

The twin blasts on a Quetta billiard hall are part of a systematic attempt by Sunni extremists to wipe out the Hazaras, a Shiite ethnic group that emigrated to Pakistan from Afghanistan three generations ago.

Sunni gunmen with links to the Taliban for over a year have been targeting members of the Persian-speaking Hazara community, often in broad daylight, on the streets of Quetta, a lawless city in Pakistan’s southwest near the frontier with Afghanistan.

But the violence against Shiites hasn’t been restricted to Quetta and the restive southwestern province of Baluchistan, of which it is the capital. Shiites have increasingly been gunned down in Karachi, the southern financial capital. In August, militants wearing Pakistan army uniforms boarded a bus travelling into Pakistan’s Himalayas and shot dead over 20 Shiite passengers after checking their identity cards.

Human Rights Watch estimates around 400 Shiites were killed in Pakistan last year, an escalation of violence that highlights the failure of Pakistan’s security forces to bring extremist groups under control despite international pressure on Pakistan to rein them in.

A look at Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a banned Sunni sectarian organization that claimed responsibility for Thursday’s attack, shows why the state is failing to stem the violence.

In the past, Shiites had little to fear in Pakistan. The country’s founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was from a Shiite sect. The country’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, is believed to be a Shiite but doesn’t comment on the matter. Adherents to the religion constitute roughly a fifth of Pakistan’s 180 million people.

In the 1980s, conflicts between Sunnis, who constitute a majority, and Shiites began to worsen, fueled by a proxy war for influence in Pakistan between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, both of whom poured money into the country to fund extremist groups.

Due to anti-Shiite propaganda, attitudes toward the minority in Pakistan began to harden. According to a poll published by the Pew Research Center in August, 41% of Sunni respondents in Pakistan said they believed Shiites were not Muslims.

In the middle of the 1980s, extremists formed the anti-Shiite Sipah-e-Sahaba in Punjab province. The group drew its support from the majority Sunni rural dwellers who opposed the area’s wealthy Shiite landowners.

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was born in the 2000s, started by more extremist members of Sipah-e-Sahaba. These militants drew support from Pakistan’s security forces who saw them as a way to fight a proxy war for control in Afghanistan and to battle Indian forces in the divided Himalayan territory of Kashmir.

Pakistan banned Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and other sectarian groups over a decade ago under pressure from the U.S. following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the allied invasion of Afghanistan.

Pakistan military commanders point to how Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and other sectarian groups since then have turned to attacking domestic army and government targets, including an attempt on former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s life.

But critics say Pakistan’s government and army have failed to adequately clamp down on these militants, fearing a backlash in the Punjab. In the southern parts of the province the groups continue to operate under new names and draw widespread support, even helping deliver votes to mainstream political parties during elections.

“Now these people are out of control,” said Farooq Hasnat, a political scientist at University of Punjab. “But still the security agencies are not serious enough to control them.”

One example critics cite is Malik Ishaq, a co-founder of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, who was released on bail by the Supreme Court in July 2011 after spending over a decade in custody.

An anti-terrorism court in Lahore had charged him with the murders of hundreds of people, including many Shiites, in scores of separate cases. The Supreme Court released him, citing lack of evidence.

Mr. Ishaq, who denies wrongdoing, has continued to make speeches against Shiites. He since has been detained on occasion for inciting hatred and released after a short while, most recently in September.

In the past decade, these groups’ ground-level fighters have increasingly found sanctuary after security crackdowns in the mountainous areas close to the border with Afghanistan where the largely ethnic-Pashtun Taliban operate.

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi began to team up with the Taliban and al Qaeda to target Pakistan government and military targets.

But under pressure from assaults by the Pakistan military on the frontier, the group appears to be again focusing on undefended Shiite targets, said Mr. Hasnat. “It’s easy because they’re soft targets.”

Feisal Hussain Naqvi, a Lahore-based lawyer, points out the current wave of anti-Shiite violence is at its worst level since the late 1990s.

Mr. Naqvi doesn’t see the attacks on Shiites as a sign of weakness, but an attempt to destabilize the country akin to al Qaeda’s bombings of Shiite targets in Iraq in the middle of the last decade.